A high-speed network environment typically includes network devices such as routers and switches that facilitate delivery of information packets from source devices to destination devices. Information pertaining to the transfer of information packet(s) through the network is usually embedded within one or more packets. Each information packet traveling through a network can typically be treated independently from other packets in a packet stream. For example, each router within a network processes incoming packets and determines where the packet(s) should be forwarded. For a modern computing network environment, in addition to ‘deterministic’ packet processing, the speed of packet processing can be critical in determining the performance of overall network system. TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) architectures are commonly used to guarantee deterministic packet processing within a network element.
To manage a network flow or control flow in a communications network element, a halt or stall of flow control can occur when one operation needs additional time to complete its task. When a processing component initiates a stalling request within a TDM architecture, various different processing elements may be at different stages of data processing. In addition, all processing elements typically need to be stalled gracefully thereby they can resume later at correct location and time.
A conventional approach to handle a stall in a communications network element is to stop all processing elements, including pipelines. All intermediary data and system controls are subsequently stored in a temporary memory thereby the processing can late be restored when the stalling request is deactivated.
A drawback associated with the conventional approach, however, is that storing and fetching intermediary data can consume time as well as memory space. Another drawback associated with the conventional approach is wasted executions time because some processing tasks are stopped in the middle of their execution in response to the stalling request.